Mrs. Kerr went to the top of the kitchen stairs and called the servant, then went up again to the first landing, having heard the parlour door open. Her brother was saying: “Now Jane, I want you to go into the surgery. I want you to write on this piece of paper that you are tired of your life.” She refused, saying that he might pour poison down her throat, but she would write nothing. He seemed to abandon his intention, gave her a glass of brandy and water, and sent her to bed in Mrs. Kerr’s room. Poor Jane sat down upon a chair, and there and then, to her sister-in-law’s astonishment, fell fast asleep.
Now comes an account of the death of Kinder. It is necessarily second-hand; the three persons who took part in the scene were in the dock, and so unable to give direct evidence. But Mrs. Kerr’s recollection of what she had been told was very exact, and there is no reason to suppose that Mrs. Bertrand’s story was fabricated.
On the morning of the first Monday in October Mrs. Bertrand was told by her husband to take the baby and accompany him to the Kinder’s house on the North Shore. It was a rainy morning, and she was reluctant that the baby should go out; however, as always, she yielded. When they arrived at the house Bertrand seemed more serious than usual, and more gentle with Mr. Kinder. He walked up and down the room very fast, gloved, and with one hand in his pocket. Jane and Mrs. Kinder were looking out of the window when they heard the report of a pistol. They turned, to see a pistol dropping from Kinder’s hand as he sat in his chair, and Bertrand taking a pipe from the table which he stuck in Kinder’s mouth. Mrs. Kinder ran from the room in terror; Bertrand followed, and forced her to return. He then took his wife’s arm in a terrible grip, and made her face the shot man, from whose head blood was flowing. “Look at him well,” said Bertrand, “I wish you to see him always before you.”
Jane bathed the wound, while Mrs. Kinder and Bertrand walked up and down the verandah embracing. She found a bullet, flattened, which had dropped against the wainscot, and showed it to her husband when he next entered the room. Bertrand took it from her, saying it was just what he wanted, and she never saw it again.
But Kinder did not die of the wound in his head. A doctor was called, with whose help Jane got him to bed; she then took up her abode in the house and nursed him faithfully for four days, at the end of which time he appeared to be recovering. When she told her husband so, Bertrand in rage said that he must not live; poison should end him if a bullet could not. He made Jane “mix the poison”; and Mrs. Kinder gave it in milk to Kinder, who died soon afterwards.
This was Jane Bertrand’s story of the crime. It was told to and recounted by her sister-in-law, Harriet, to whose presence in the house in Wynyard Square Jane may have owed her life.
I wished to protect Mrs. Bertrand, in fact that was what I stayed in the house for, and I must also add, I stayed partly in fear of my life. We were always in dread of our lives. He [Bertrand] did not appear to wish me out of the house, but quite the contrary.… I was his favourite sister, though he did not show it by his manner. He was often very eccentric. Even in gaping he would imitate the roar of a tiger and had done it in the street.… Bertrand often told me, at that time, that he had a great mind to murder Mrs. Bertrand and say I had done it.
VII
This evidence concerning poison was something quite unexpected by the public. The verdict at the inquest had been death by shooting, and the possibility that Kinder might have died from any other cause had not been considered. The Crown witnesses were elusive on this point. A chemist who had analysed the contents of the stomach found no traces of poison, but stated that, since certain vegetable poisons rapidly decomposed in the stomach, this analysis did not rule out the possibility that they had been employed. He was asked if aconite or belladonna came within this category of untraceable substances. (Aconite and belladonna were found in Bertrand’s surgery.) He replied that they did; that one or the other might have been administered, as was asserted, on October 6th; but that now, two months later, it was a matter impossible to be proved.
The Crown accordingly let this point go, and called up the surgeons who had performed the post-mortem. They agreed as to the nature and direction of the wound. The shot had blown off the ear and broken the lower jaw; the brain itself was not touched. In short, of such a wound a man in good health and of temperate habits need not have died. But Kinder was not in good health, and he had been drinking heavily for months. He had lost a good deal of blood, and to this haemorrhage, with the shock and subsequent exhaustion, all three doctors attributed his death.
On one matter they disagreed, and here was a point eagerly caught at by the defence, since it seemed to square with what Bertrand had told Burne on the evening of the murder. Bertrand’s story then was, that the whole affair was an accident, and that the pistol had been charged with powder and a wad only. No bullet had, in fact, been found in the skull by the doctors who conducted the post-mortem examination. Was it possible, asked Mr. Robberds, for the defence, that Kinder might have done as was suggested, pulled the trigger of a pistol charged but not loaded, and that the wound, which extended from the top of the ear to the lower angle of the jaw, could have been caused by gunpowder and wadding only?
Dr. Alloway, who had served in the Crimea, and had seen many gunshot wounds during his service in India as an army surgeon, gave it as his opinion that such a thing was not possible. He maintained that the external condyle of the lower jaw showed marks of having been struck by some hard substance at the point of fracture; and that wadding from a pistol could never have broken so thick a bone, no matter how great the charge of powder behind it.
Dr. Allayne did not see “anything to indicate that the injury was caused by a round substance such as a bullet”. The force of the explosion alone, he declared, was sufficient to cause such a wound—that is, if the pistol were held close to the head.
Dr. Eichler came to the conclusion that the wound had been self-inflicted, but would not give an opinion as to whether or no it was a bullet that had caused the damage to the jawbone.
If the description of the direction of the wound is correct, it is difficult to see how it could have been self-inflicted. The bullet, or wad, whichever caused the damage, had entered behind the right ear, detaching the ear itself from the scalp, and continued its course forward and downward to break the jawbone on the right side. It is quite extraordinarily difficult for a man to hold a pistol so as to inflict such a wound upon himself; the trigger must be pulled with the thumb, and the head must be turned down and to the left at a painful angle. On the other hand, if the shot were fired by a right-handed man standing behind a seated man, the direction of the wound is easily accounted for. (According to Jane Bertrand’s story, Kinder was seated, and Bertrand standing or strolling, at the time when she heard the shot fired.) There is the possibility that a suicide might point the barrel of his weapon at his jaw; but the doctors were agreed, from the evidences of powder blackening, that the missile, whatever it may have been, entered behind the ear.
It might be supposed that the case for the Crown was by this time strong enough; but there were two more witnesses to come. Francis Arthur Jackson was brought to Sydney from Parramatta Gaol to give evidence concerning the triangular relationship between Kinder, his wife, and Bertrand. Agnes Mary Robertson, whose charge of using threatening language had brought Bertrand to Darlinghurst, appeared to testify to the dentist’s frantic and unreasonable rages.
VIII
Jackson had an unsavoury story to tell. He had known the Kinders in New Zealand, where he had been intimate with the woman; this intimacy was resumed when, six months before the date of Kinder’s death, he came to live in their house on the North Shore. Bertrand was a frequent and difficult visitor, who showed his feeling for Ellen Kinder very plainly, and made it clear to Jackson that he would not tolerate a rival.
During a conversation with Mrs. Kinder, as she saw Bertrand coming in she said I had better go. I said no, I thought not. I asked her when Bertrand was there which of the two men she preferred. Bertrand would not speak
